The present invention relates to telephone call capturing and, more particularly, but not exclusively to an apparatus and methods for capturing telephone calls made using voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technologies.
Telephone call recording and monitoring systems are increasingly being used by businesses. For example telephone call recording and monitoring systems may be used for monitoring the effectiveness of agents who receive telephone calls at a calling center.
At present, the dominating telephone call capturing solutions are based on circuit-switched technologies.
Reference is now made to FIG. 1, which is a block diagram illustrating an exemplary current technology based system for capturing phone calls. The system 1000 is applicable to capture of phone calls made using an analog or digital Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
With system 1000 which is based on current technology, the capturing equipment 110 taps the lines 150 which connect a telephone 120, and an analog or a digital Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) 130 or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), for capturing phone calls.
Such a system is well suited to traditional phone networks. Traditional phone networks are based on circuit switching where a switching loop connection connects the phone 120 and the exchange 130, bi-directionally.
The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service market is growing fast and has become a widespread, popular, and economical alternative to traditional switching loop based telephony networks.
Data networks such as the Internet do not use circuit switching, but are rather based on packet switching. The data networks send and retrieve data on demand. That is to say, instead of routing the data over a dedicated line, data packets flow through a data network along thousands of possible paths. Thus, such communication is relatively diffused evenly across a WAN (wide area network) or LAN (local area network).
VoIP technology capabilities may be used to provide phone service. VoIP has several advantages over circuit switching.
For example, packet switching allows several telephone calls to occupy the amount of space occupied by only one in a circuit-switched network. Each telephone call's data has its own data packets, but all packets are sent through the same network space.
Reference is now made to FIG. 2 which is a block diagram illustrating a VoIP phone connection to a local computer network.
In VoIP phone calls there is no connection to a PABX, instead the phone 210 is connected to an access switch 220, which is a part of the data communication network of an organization.
Existing circuit-switched telephone call recording systems installed in a circuit-switched environment may operate by tapping the extensions or trunks coupled to a circuit-loop switch. Alternatively, the recording system may use the service observation feature of the circuit-loop switch or a dedicated recording connection to observe silently an extension.
Most existing call recording systems are designed for the circuit-switched environment, and are unsuited to VoIP telephony. Existing call recording systems are designed for tapping at the PBX which is a meeting point that all the phone conversation pass through.
Existing VoIP capturing and monitoring systems are typically installed locally, at a central switch of a remote branch of an organization having remote facilities and a central data center.
Current VoIP capturing and monitoring systems depend on the availability of mirroring services (such a switch port analyzer—SPAN or remote switch port analyzer—RSPAN, both offered by Cisco™), or tunneled mirroring sessions (such encapsulated remote switch port analyzer—ERSPAN, to Cisco™) on the switch that the voice over IP capturing system is connected to.
Consequently, current VoIP capturing systems are only suited to certain central switches which support such advanced mirroring session services, and have the intensive CPU resources that the mirroring sessions consume. However, current VoIP capturing systems are unsuited for capturing incoming or outgoing VoIP phone calls directly from a VoIP phone's regular access switch which lacks support for such mirroring sessions.
A locally installed system requires expensive dedicated hardware. Takes up room, costs money and you need enough to cover all possible connection paths. Alternatively, an organization having multiple remote offices may hire dedicated expensive tie lines for sending the audio to be stored at a central location.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, an apparatus and methods, devoid of the above limitations.